The objective is to cook them fast-they’ll start opening after three or four minutes, when you give the pan a swirl, mixing the shellfish juice with the buttery porky white wine emulsion. In Stage Two, you drop the pasta in boiling water and take your messy pan and fill it with big handfuls of clams and put it on the highest flame possible.

There are restaurants who won’t use lemon because they think it’s excessive.) (“Italians,” Mario says won’t mess with their fish. This is Stage One-and you are left with the familiar buttery mush-but you’ve already added two things you’d never see in Italy: butter (seafood with butter-or any other dairy ingredient-verges on culinary blaspheme), and pancetta, because, according to Mario, pork and shellfish are an eternal combination found in many other places: in Portugal, in ameijoas na cataplana (clams and ham) or in Spain, in paella (chorizo and scallops) or in the United States, in the Italian American clams casino, even though none of these places happen to be in Italy. Hot oil accelerates the cooking process and the moment that everything gets soft you pour it away (holding back the contents with your tongs) and add a slap of butter and a splash of white wine, which stops the cooking. My advice: ignore the Babbo cookbook and begin roasting small pinches of garlic and chili flakes and medium pinches of the onion and pancetta in a hot pan with olive oil. In this first excerpt, he does just that: I was impressed by Bulford’s ability to take a complicated recipe from a professional kitchen and describe the process with directions and imagery that I could clearly understand. You may not after you read “Heat”, unless you are intrigued by the Chef Gordon Ramsay type and then I say read on. Perhaps you admire Mario’s accomplishments on Food TV and in the culinary world. His sub-title states “” The fascinating Mario Batali is a central figure in this recounting. I am not really sure why a writer for the New York Times would give up hours upon hours of time with his family, at his own expense and want to volunteer in the kitchen of a number of stressful, hectic kitchens, with no apparent motive except to see if his culinary skills could stand up in a professional kitchen, but that is the premise of Bill Bulford’s “Heat”.

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